Review: Maria Muldaur shows she still has her voice and energy in retrospective at Godfrey Daniels

Alan Mercer

Maria Muldaur performed Saturday night at Godfrey Daniels, Bethlehem.

Maria Muldaur performed Saturday night at Godfrey Daniels, Bethlehem.

(Alan Mercer)

Dave HowellSpecial to The Morning Call

This is so cozy," said Maria Muldaur as she came onstage Saturday to a packed house at Godfrey Daniels.

"This is so cozy,” said Maria Muldaur as she came onstage Saturday night to a packed house at Southside Bethlehem’s Godfrey Daniels. It was the first time she had been there since four visits in the 1980s. This show was different.

Rather than focusing on her latest material, Muldaur, accompanied by her Red Hot Bluesiana Band, did a retrospective of her career of about 50 years. With the aid of a succession of photos projected on a screen next to the stage, Muldaur told stories about her life and about each of the songs she performed during her hour and 45 minute show.

It has been quite a life. Growing up in an Italian family in New York City’s Greenwich Village as Maria D’Amato, she lived in the middle of that “mecca for artists” and during “the folk scare of the 60s.” She recalled a party where she danced with both Alan Watts and Anais Nin, and a concert where she sat right in front of Rambling Jack Elliot and an ailing Woody Guthrie.

Her first song was her usual opener, Leiber and Stoller’s “I’m a Woman.” Then she picked up a fiddle, an instrument she has neglected over the years, despite the repeated encouragement of her friend Bob Dylan to play it again. She talked about and sang Dolly Parton’s “My Old Tennessee Home,” which she recorded with Linda Ronstadt.

And she did “The Work Song” by Godfreys favorites Kate and Anna McGarrigle, who wrote old fashioned songs that Muldaur said could have come from the time of Steven Foster. One of her most moving stories was about her recording of “Rockin’ Chair,” where the producer persuaded its composer, the aging, retired Hoagy Carmichael, to play accompaniment on piano.

Muldaur has not lost her voice or her energy. You did not need to hear the stories to know that each song meant something to her.

Chris Ross on drums kept an understated beat that worked well for the small club. Chris Adkins on acoustic and electric guitar and background vocals put out a variety of polished licks, and Chris Burns on electric keyboard and background vocals, providing the bass with his left hand, showed a mastery of New Orleans, boogie, and many other forms of Americana.

Muldaur again picked up her tambourine, which she played on a few songs, for the “greasy,” down home “Cajun Moon,” by J.J. Cale. For “Louisiana Love Call” she recalled her duet with Aaron Neville. Then she did “the big three”: her most popular and requested songs. “It’s Ain’t The Meat, It’s the Motion” and “Don’t You Feel My Leg” were considered quite risqué when she recorded them. “How times have changed,” she correctly noted.

Muldaur earlier described her biggest hit as “that goofy little song about the camel.” More to the point, she said she had never heard anything like it before or since. It was wonderful to hear “Midnight at the Oasis” while looking at pictures of Muldaur taken for her 1974 cover of Rolling Stone.

At the end, she went back to the beginning of her career, as she recalled the formation of the Even Dozen Jug Band with her friends John Sebastian and David Grisman. That led to a gig with The Jim Kreskin Jug Band, where she met her husband Geoff Muldaur. She sang “He Calls That Religion,” from her jug band album “Garden of Joy,” and ended the evening with the rousing “The Power of Music.” Muldaur, as much as anyone, proved that it has a whole lot of power.